In MY country, any serious gamer owns a water-cooled machine and does all that. And I'm proud to be part of that group. Or rather, WAS a part of. Stopped with the water cooling some years back after neglecting to secure the pipes properly after taking them apart to clean and replace the distilled water and a leak shorted out the whole machine.

10-14-2012, 11:17 AM

christian_frank

The devs should change their mind...

Why ?

-we are talking about an interface here
-Why the fuck should i buy an optimus laptop with a discrete nvidia card when i don't want to do some gaming ? And please don't tell me i should use noveau for that ! If you want to tell me now that nvidia simply should open their specs and provide documentation, then take a look where radeon is WITH all these infos .
-Freedom of choice ! If the enduser wants to use the nvidia blob for whatever reason, he should be able to get the best features out of it.

I would be really happy to see the linux desktop market share growing. Really ! But to make this happen the users need to get the best experience possible, no matter if we are talking about an opensource or closed driver.

10-14-2012, 11:24 AM

artivision

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sonadow

That's your own problem for reading too deep into a simple comment.

He only said that they hope to have launch day support with the open radeon driver when HD8xxx is released. NOTHING about replacing Catalyst anywhere. The idea that the radeon driver can replace Catalust is just what YOU wanted it to be and was never ever mentioned anywhere by Bridgman.

I speak for something AMD said years ago, not for their latest comments for support from the launch date. If they not remember fine, its been years.

10-14-2012, 11:34 AM

bridgman

Quote:

Originally Posted by artivision

I speak for something AMD said years ago, not for their latest comments for support from the launch date. If they not remember fine, its been years.

Just so I understand, you're saying that "years ago" we said that we would get rid of Catalyst Linux for HD8000 series ? I've been involved with the open source drivers since the HD2000 days and I really don't remember anything like that.

10-14-2012, 11:50 AM

entropy

OT: AMD Layoffs

John,

I read about the unfortunate layoffs at AMD.

While I know you're not responsible anymore for the open-source department,
can you tell us if it those layoffs (directly) affect the HSA and open-source efforts,
i.e. affecting paid developers, writing the docs and doc reviews by the legal department?

10-14-2012, 11:53 AM

christian_frank

Quote:

Originally Posted by asdx

Won't happen. Get over it. Linux devs already made their mind. Nvidia can't use DMA-BUF.

That's sad and doesn't make the decision less dumb . Thanks to the dev's for NOT taking care about end users ! If their intention was
to keep people with optimus laptops away from Linux, well done guys ! We surely will not see the "year of the linux desktop"anytime soon with this attitude.

10-14-2012, 12:41 PM

christian_frank

Quote:

Originally Posted by asdx

The kernel is GPL and it has to be respected. What's dumb is Nvidia pretending that they can do whatever they want here. If they want to use Linux interfaces they need to play by our rules and respect the license.

Well, i don't share your opinion here. If they wanted to reuse gpl kernel code in their code or if they wanted to push closed source code parts into the kernel, i would agree with you.
But they really only want to use an interface for communication. Nothing more. Thats far away from beeing evil imho.

Another example: If e.g an USB Dongle copy protection hw vendor wants to use the usb interface for communcation with the device, but the way it does it is closed source for keeping the copy protection save, would you also deny this ?

10-14-2012, 12:54 PM

Sonadow

Quote:

Originally Posted by christian_frank

Why ?

-we are talking about an interface here
-Why the fuck should i buy an optimus laptop with a discrete nvidia card when i don't want to do some gaming ? And please don't tell me i should use noveau for that ! If you want to tell me now that nvidia simply should open their specs and provide documentation, then take a look where radeon is WITH all these infos .
-Freedom of choice ! If the enduser wants to use the nvidia blob for whatever reason, he should be able to get the best features out of it.

I would be really happy to see the linux desktop market share growing. Really ! But to make this happen the users need to get the best experience possible, no matter if we are talking about an opensource or closed driver.

Objectively speaking, it is a dick move by Alan Cox and the devs but your feelings are a bit misplaced.

For one. if you are buying a notebook with an Nvidia graphics card to play games you should be running Windows as the primary operating system, not Linux. Even when Steam for Linux arrives, it will only bring a tiny subset of games to Linux. Windows is still where the other 90+% of extremely graphics-intensive, resource-demanding AAA titles are published for. WINE is no substitute and should never be seen as one. If one is going to spend more than half the time playing Windows games, use the right operating system for the right job and run Windows 7 with its full DirectX 11 support.

More importantly, the Nvidia driver in Windows also has more options, such as offering the ability to select either the integrated Intel HD graphics or the dedicated GPU as the primary hardware to drive graphics rendering, or to leave it at the default auto-switching mode (which works remarkably well most of the time).

Therefore it really makes zero sense to install Linux on a notebook that utilizes Nvidia's Optimus technology. Bumblebee's Optirun is lilttle more than a kludge to enable the use of the dedicated GPU on an application-by-application basis, and the Linux kernel is not intelligent enough to automatically shut down the dedicated GPU even if the Intel core is being used as the primary renderer, wheras in Windows it does.

If you already own such a notebook, my best advice is to simply swallow your distaste for Windows and use it for the better driver and power support, or sell it off and get a notebook with only Intel's built-in graphics.

10-14-2012, 01:09 PM

christian_frank

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sonadow

Objectively speaking, it is a dick move by Alan Cox and the devs but your feelings are a bit misplaced.

For one. if you are buying a notebook with an Nvidia graphics card to play games you should be running Windows as the primary operating system, not Linux. Even when Steam for Linux arrives, it will only bring a tiny subset of games to Linux. Windows is still where the other 90+% of extremely graphics-intensive, resource-demanding AAA titles are published for. WINE is no substitute and should never be seen as one. If one is going to spend more than half the time playing Windows games, use the right operating system for the right job and run Windows 7 with its full DirectX 11 support.

More importantly, the Nvidia driver in Windows also has more options, such as offering the ability to select either the integrated Intel HD graphics or the dedicated GPU as the primary hardware to drive graphics rendering, or to leave it at the default auto-switching mode (which works remarkably well most of the time).

Therefore it really makes zero sense to install Linux on a notebook that utilizes Nvidia's Optimus technology. Bumblebee's Optirun is lilttle more than a kludge to enable the use of the dedicated GPU on an application-by-application basis, and the Linux kernel is not intelligent enough to automatically shut down the dedicated GPU even if the Intel core is being used as the primary renderer, wheras in Windows it does.

If you already own such a notebook, my best advice is to simply swallow your distaste for Windows and use it for the better driver and power support, or sell it off and get a notebook with only Intel's built-in graphics.

My feelings are not misplaced and yes, this is really a dick move.
I'm owning a nvidia optimus laptop and i'm running win 7 on it right now cause of the lack of optimus support from nvidia. I play games from time to time, mostly SC2 which runs fine with cx/wine on my nvidia desktop. It also would run fine on my laptop. All upcoming valve games also easily would run on this laptop, IF you run the NVIDIA blob.

So i'm forced to use a OS which I REALLY dislike cause some of the devs of my favourite OS are, imho, acting like little kids with bullheads from time to time.

10-14-2012, 01:25 PM

Sonadow

Quote:

Originally Posted by christian_frank

My feelings are not misplaced and yes, this is really a dick move.
I'm owning a nvidia optimus laptop and i'm running win 7 on it right now cause of the lack of optimus support from nvidia. I play games from time to time, mostly SC2 which runs fine with cx/wine on my nvidia desktop. It also would run fine on my laptop. All upcoming valve games also easily would run on this laptop, IF you run the NVIDIA blob.

So i'm forced to use a OS which I REALLY dislike cause some of the devs of my favourite OS are, imho, acting like little kids with bullheads from time to time.

I can only say that it is never good when one starts to use words such as 'like' or 'dislike' to describe an operating system. They are just tools; a means to achieve an end. And one should always use the most suitable tool for any job.

Im not fond of Linux. At all. But i use it because the build toolchain is much easier to understand than Microsoft's Visual Studio environment where the command line tools for compiling software are confusing enough to baffle just about anybody (although Visual Studio the IDE is outstanding).

In a similar vein, Im not all that fond of how Windows loves to call home to its servers to check whether my copy is legitimate, whether my copy of Office is legitimate, etc etc. But I don't mind those annoyances because it enjoys the support of every single pheripheral vendor out there which essentially gurantees driver availability for virtually any hardware or pheripheral ever produced. And as someone who chases after the latest hardware on a regular basis (and burning a huge hole in the bank a/c in the process). this support is something that is totally priceless.

Finally, I always prefer to have all my software and applications come from one centralized provider for the sake of integration. That said, it should be little surprise that Windows is still my primary system. Again, it all boils down to choosing the best tool for the job.